“We made bad choices”: the movie Richard Gere considers the ultimate “nadir” of his career
It only takes one bad movie to disrupt an actor’s momentum, but a few bad movies in a row can leave them dead in the water, with Richard Gere doing a remarkable job of bungling his newfound A-list status.
Headlining American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman consecutively will do wonders for any up-and-coming star’s career, with those two pictures turning Gere into one of the definitive heartthrobs of 1980s cinema, and it helped that they each made a killing at the box office.
However, like so many before him, he didn’t want to be typecast as a pretty face, so he decided to tackle productions that he found more challenging and daring. It was an admirable sentiment, albeit one that backfired spectacularly when almost all of his films for the remainder of the decade were total flops.
Between the release of An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982 and Internal Affairs eight years later, which put some much-needed wind back in his sails, Gere was in danger of becoming yesterday’s man. He made seven pictures in that period, and the results weren’t great.
The Honorary Consul? Bombed. The Cotton Club? Bombed even harder. No Mercy? Failed to make its budget back from cinemas. Power? Another bomb. Miles from Home? Yep, another bomb. Breathless was the sole outlier, and even at that, it was far from being a runaway hit or a universally acclaimed return to form.
Sandwiched in between them was the most embarrassing of the bunch, though, with Gere deciding that headlining the biblical epic King David was exactly what his stagnating career needed. Spoiler: it wasn’t, with Bruce Beresford’s folly failing to net even 25% of its production costs in ticket sales, with the director admitting that “there are so many things that are wrong” with his film, not least of all Gere’s casting.
It’s never a good sign when the person calling the shots has no other choice but to admit their leading man was woefully miscast as the title character, and for Gere’s long-time agent, Ed Limato, the wounds that had been caused by yet another misstep had failed to heal, even a decade after King David‘s release.
“We made bad choices,” Limato conceded in 1996, coincidentally at right around the same time Primal Fear had given his client their best role in years. “I think King David was a nadir. Richard was getting depressed about it. At a certain point, it was obvious to him that he didn’t have anything that he wanted to do.”
Cruelly, another sting in the tale was to come. By the end of the ’90s, Gere had the sneaking suspicion that his ongoing support for Tibet had seen him blacklisted in Hollywood’s highest corridors of power, and since he hasn’t played a huge amount of high-profile parts since then, he might be onto something, even if he hasn’t made anything quite as egregious as King David.
